It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.

One of the biggest reasons why we tend to love Android is its open source nature which allows us to customize our phones as and how we want them to look, feel and behave. So, from being able to use custom launchers to changing the font of our phones, from playing around with a variety of widgets to numerous icon sets, we can safely say that every aspect of our Android experience is customizable.

While we can configure and customize each and every element of our phones individually, most of us also tend to like having a unified design for our device which brings me to the topic of themes. A well designed theme can not only add beauty and class to your phone but also make the whole experience of using it more consistent. Today we present some of the best themes going around which will enhance how your phone looks, giving it a beautiful makeover.

It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.

Being Android users, we have a bigger opportunity to customise our devices. Opposed to the likes of iOS, the Open Source software allows anyone to fiddle around with a huge range of things. One such aspect many of us have been keen to change is the font. Normally, you’ll only have the choice of three different font sizes on your phone, however, with extra apps and websites its possible to give yourself a much bigger choice.

As part of of the Customisation month on Android.Appstorm today I’m going to address the different ways you can do this. I’ll also provide links to apps and web pages which make the process much easier.

It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.

At the heart of your Android experience with your device is the launcher — this is the program that allows you to view and start all your apps, add widgets to your home screen and customize the way you interact with your phone or tablet. Setting it up correctly will allow you to not only access the information and tools you need quickly, but also personalize the way the OS looks and feels, to suit your taste.

You’ll want to choose a launcher based on your version of Android as well as your personal needs and preferences, and there’s a vast array of them to choose from in the Play Store — but to get started, you should probably first explore the default launcher that your device ships with — especially if you’re running Android 4.x. Today, I’m going to go over some basic ways of setting up your launcher, with tweaks that are generally available across the spectrum of different launchers to help you get familiar with the possibilities and benefits of doing so.

It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.

We recently took a look at Ultimate Custom Widget (UCCW) and showed you how it can be used to create stunning and versatile home screen widgets. But if you don’t feel included, or don’t have the time to create your own from scratch, there are plenty of ready-made widgets for you to download. Here are some of the highlights.

It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.

When it comes to customizing your Android home screen, choice is more than abundant. All you need to do is think of what you want, and there’s a good chance it already exists somewhere in the bylanes of the official Play store or in a developer forum somewhere. And for things that are too specific for a readymade solution, there are DIY apps that will let you build your home screen widget from scratch.

Ultimate Custom Clock Widget— or UCCW as it is popularly known — is one such app. With more options than you can shake a stick at, UCCW lets you build your own custom homescreen widgets pretty much the way you like. And although there is a whole community of enthusiastic modders who spend hours fine-tuning their UCCW creations and making them available to anyone to download, there is something to be said for the satisfaction of creating one of your own.

It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.

Time and time again when people ask me why I prefer Android to iOS, my number one answer is, “freedom.” The freedom to customize the homescreen as you see fit, not just moving icons around, the freedom to use custom launchers, and the freedom to install apps that are not on the Play Store. And because Android has such an active developer community, that freedom increases a hundred fold when you root your device. Once you do that, you have the ability to install custom ROMs, or builds of the Android OS. That’s when things get really fun.

If you’re anything like me, you get easily irritated by all the Picasa Albums that appear in your Gallery. Thanks to Google account sync, and to the fact that every image you post to Google+ somehow ends up creating its own album on Picasa, your Gallery looks like a never-ending string of albums that contain one or two images each thanks to Picasa.

If all you’d like when you open the Gallery is to see the photos that are actually stored on your device — and the SD card if you’re using it — then follow this walkthrough to get rid of all the Picasa albums.

It’s no secret that I have a lot of devices at my disposal including phones, tablets, computers, and even Google TV. I like that pretty much from any place in my apartment — or office, or coffeeshop I happen to be working at — I can use any of those devices to do things like read, check the weather, or whatever Internet-based task I have to perform. However, when it came to texting I was locked down to using my phone for a long time; all of that changed with MightyText.

Near Field Communication, or NFC, has been mentioned a few times here on Android.Appstorm, including a few articles by yours truly. The topic really fascinates and excites me because of the endless possibilities it affords us. About a year ago I wrote an article entitled Near Field Communication and the Future of Mobile, where I outlined what’s in store for NFC-enabled cell phones, of which Android has a few.

However, NFC isn’t only for phones. There are devices called NFC tags, and they can really shake up the way we do things.

When the Nexus 7 was released, everyone highlighted all of its superior qualities but there was one negative which seemed to spring up everywhere – the lack of external storage. With only one input for micro-USB and no SD card slot, we were limited to whatever size we decided to buy. Personally, I went with the now-discontinued 8GB model, so I have about 6GB to fit everything I want — roughly three films could stop me from downloading anything else. But even the 16GB version can filled quite quickly.

So, as the Android community normally does, they found a way to bypass this problem. This fix comes in the form of Nexus Media Importer, an app that allows you to easily transfer or play files from an external storage device. Read on to find out how useful it can be.